Today I’m going to vent about a writing pet peeve I have. It’s when writers try to do more than one thing simultaneously in your writing.

Now, by this I don’t mean trying to infuse sensory details while evoking emotional responses. That’s part of good writing. What I’m talking about is having someone walk down the steps as they’re running their fingers through their hair,
or talking to their sister while they’re looking at the man across the room.
Those two words, as and while, have become words that immediately jump off the page for me when I’m editing projects for clients. They tend to point to someone trying to either tell me what is going on or someone trying to do too many things at one time.
Remember, in writing we can only see one thing at a time. That means that you have to describe one action, the implications and then move on to the next action. By trying to tell me two things are happening simultaneously you’re going to pull me out of story world. Things are going to jump out of order and it’s going to distract me as a reader.
So make sure as you’re going through your writing and your personal revisions that you look out for the words as and while. Whenever you see those make sure that you’re not trying to describe two physical actions happening simultaneously.
Instead go in and change up those words and infuse more detail. Take your reader deeper down into your character.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

All right, so today we’re going to talk about three of my favorite little tools when I’m working on creating my story world. That is Google Earth, Dictionary.com and Wikipedia.

First, Google Earth. I like Google Earth because I can fly anywhere and see anything. If you’re not familiar with Google Earth just go to Google.com or put Google Earth in your search and you can download it. Once it’s on your system you can put in an address or a city or a landmark, and it’ll take you there. You can fly over top, you can go from the road view on most areas. But it gives you a sense of the terrain and what things look like and it really helps to add authenticity to your story.

Dictionary.com. I like this because I like words. You can get word of the day sent to you, but more than that, I like to be able to get some of those synonyms. I have my Flip Dictionary, I love my Flip Dictionary, It’s a very useful writer’s tool. But when I’m working, particularly when I’m working up at my office in town, I don’t always have my Flip Dictionary with me because that stays at my house. Dictionary.com is a great tool for me to go and get some of those synonyms.

Wikipedia. Now some people like to besmirch Wikipedia but I actually like it for a couple of reasons. One, because it is so subjective. I can go in there and find out what other people think of certain things, whether it’s accurate or not. As writers we need to understand how other people view things so that we can get inside of that point of view and help create more well-rounded characters. You can also find out interesting tidbits about some really obscure things. So while it isn’t my authoritative text for scholarly research, when I’m trying to create story world I love it.

So for today, using technology to build your writing, I would encourage you to check out Google Earth, Dictionary.com and Wikipedia during your ten-minute break and see if any of these resources will help you enrich your story world or build your writing in a new and exciting way.

I’ll see you next time when we’re going to be delving into some fiction techniques that will help you with your overall writing craft.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Today’s blog is going to be really short. I’d like to simply talk about something I learned recently and that is about TweetDeck. I personally love TweetDeck. I have it open right now on my desk and when I put something on TweetDeck it automatically goes to my LinkedIn page and Twitter page. My Twitter account is further integrated with my Facebook account.

I can use this so many ways.

One thing it’s helped me do is control my distractions because I don’t have to go to all of the individual sites each time I want to put something up. You’ll recall in my organizing series of blogs I talked about scheduling in those breaks.  That was under Organizing Your Time, the third blog, schedule in breaks.

During those breaks I will sometimes jump over and see what my friends are up to on Facebook, to comment. For those of you who have followed Chip MacGregor’s blog when he talks about Social Media, you know that interacting via social media is about dialog. It’s about going over and seeing what other people are doing. Not just about advertising your wares. I will go on my TweetDeck and I will look and see if there are interesting articles or I’ll comment to friends or I post things up. That is because TweetDeck organizes the messages from all the people I follow. In under a minute I can scan for things I’d like to check out and then get off the page.

Another thing I use TweetDeck for is scheduling tweets. Again, once I’ve scheduled a tweet it automatically goes through to my LinkedIn and my Facebook and my Twitter pages. I’ll do this because, like I said, I do fifty minutes of work and ten minutes of breaks. During those breaks I like to read articles and see what people have to say. Sometimes I come up with funny little quotes like I did a couple weeks ago about fishing. And they come at me all at once. A lot of you writers can relate. So I will type three or four of these little tweet ideas that pop in my head during my ten-minute break and I schedule them to post throughout the day. That way I’m not attacking people with three tweets all at once that get ignored and then nothing on Twitter for hours at a time. That allows me to stay in front of people at a regular interval without constantly breaking my work pattern to post.

So that’s my little plug for TweetDeck. I’m sure there are other platforms that work equally well and I would love for you guys to leave a comment and tell me about some of them. Some of the links will get caught in spam, so if you could just tell us about it and maybe email me directly through WritingCareerCoach.com’s website content page I can tell others. If you have a specific link that would be great.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Definitely the way to get the most out of your webinar is to come in with questions. The best feature of webinars is that they offer the opportunity to ask questions.

Tied along with this is see if the webinar is being recorded or the teaching is available for sale. I suggest this because a webinar can be very overwhelming. Any teaching done by a good teacher will offer far more ideas than you can possibly implement right after the teaching is done. Therefore, by purchasing the webinar you can implement each of these steps incrementally to further grow your writing business.

Also, attend webinars beyond those on writing. Get involved with business networking groups that provide webinars on marketing and sales calls. Join webinars that discuss public speaking or personal development. All of these offer information that can be used to grow your writing business as well as creating believable characters. 

To recap, webinars are great. I strongly urge to take part in them.
I encourage you to take part in writing webinars that are specific to the craft.
Business webinars that will help you with your marketing angle, and also if you can attend webinars or presentations online given by people who have an area of expertise that may benefit the plotline of your stories.

All of those are great ways to take advantage of the available technology, to reduce the cost of learning about your craft and your industry.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

In this blog I’d like to talk briefly about using webinars to build your writing. There’s two ways that you can do this.
• Attending a webinar or
• Holding a webinar.

First, I’m going to talk about attending a webinar. Attending webinars can help your writing because they allow you to use the resources that you have to get the most out of your learning dollar. Another great feature of webinars is many webinars tend to be more interactive where you can type in questions. Many are also recorded so that you can reuse them. I strongly encourage writers to attend webinars. The great part about webinars is writers can pool their resources, so that they can receive learning far less expensively.

This takes me to the next part of writing webinars and using technology to build your writing and that is holding a webinar. When should you hold a webinar? I suggest a professional of any kind should hold a webinar if you have something that you’re frequently asked to speak on. For example, I’m asked to speak on business principles for writers and writing principles for businesses. Therefore, I have a following of a group of people who tend to come to my events and want to learn. And so having these events online allows me to reach a larger population of my clients at one time and it allows me to interact with them in a way that I can’t always do at, say, a writer’s conference or a business group. So that would be one reason why you would want to hold them

Another reason to hold a webinar would be if you have information that is of benefit to writers. Let’s say for example, your day job is nursing. You can speak on topics in nursing that would be of interest to writers. If you are a full-time writer, invite someone to come and speak on your webinar who knows something about, let’s say forensics, or a historical landmark or time period clothing. Certain facets of different industries can help you add depth and richness to your writing. That would be another time to hold a webinar.

Webinars can be great learning opportunities as well as a way to help develop your business. Explore the resources available and if you have ideas for webinars you’d like Writing Career Coach to do, put the topics in the comments section then sign up for our newsletter. We will update you on upcoming webinars.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

We talked about this a little bit last week when we were talking about organizing your time. Now we want to think a little bit about whether you have everything you need to accomplish your goals.

I don’t mean if you have all of the necessary training or background. Writing is a growth process so you’ll never arrive there. What I mean is just simple things. When you sit down to write do you have the notes that you need?
Do you have your character sketches?
Do you have your copy of Writing The Breakout Novel?
Do you have pictures that you use to help describe your main characters?
Do you have pencils to jot down notes?
Do you have your mouse? Your keyboard? Whatever it is that you use as part of the writing process so you’re not getting up and down out of your seat constantly to get things that you might have forgotten.

Organizing your workspace, as we said in the last post, is not always a matter of eliminating distractions but it’s also including things that will keep you focused and on task.

Till next time, remember to organize your workspace as well as your time.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website atwritingcareercoach.com.

Last post we talked about mentally preparing to write in our writing workspace. Today we’re going to continue with that by looking at ourselves when we’re in our workspace. Think about where it is that you do your work. When I’m sitting at my home desk, as opposed to my office where I do most of my work, my home desk is full of pictures my daughters colored for me. There’s a broken toy that I took away from the dog when it ran under my desk, a necklace I wore yesterday, and an empty bottle for a prescription that needs to be refilled. All of these things remind me of other tasks that need to be done. Whether it’s picking up my clutter, putting away my jewelry or getting that prescription picked up, all of these things will pull me out of the writing zone if I allow them. That’s why it is so important to minimize the amount of things that you keep in the area where you are going to work.

Just as certain things on your desk can cause your mind to stray, you can minimize distractions by introducing things that are going to keep you focused on your writing. For example, I have the book The Elements of Style sitting next to my laptop. I have my good luck eraser that I play with whenever I’m trying to think through a scene. I have my hair clip that I always keep next to me so that I don’t have to get up if my hair starts to fall in my face, and I have my character sketches and notes for the stories that I’m currently working on.

By introducing things that I use in my writing and excluding those things that I use as a mom and wife, I am able to more focus my time and organize my space. This allows me to get the most out of my writing time.

So what is it that you are currently putting around you when you are writing? Are they things that are helping you? Or is your workspace full of distractions? Consider these questions this week and make adjustments as necessary so that you can better organize your time as a writer.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website atwritingcareercoach.com.

In keeping with our theme we are now going to move from organizing our time to organizing our writing workspace. There are three ways that you need to organize your workspace.
• You need to mentally organize your work space.
• You need to organize your workspace to minimize distractions and maximize efficiency.
• And you need to know what you’re going to do each day.

Today we’re going to look at the mental aspect of organizing your writing time.

Where is it that you work? This space can be a separate office or a space at your kitchen table. Wherever it is, make that place your office. Mentally prepare yourself so that is where you write. It may seem odd, but when I was in college I read a study about the brain. It said that studying in your bedroom actually can cause problems with sleeping because your brain becomes trained to study in that place. Our brain associates different spaces with different activities.

The more I learned about that, the more I recognized the truth of that. Think about when you’re heading to work, how you’re mentally shifting. When you move from work to school, school to church, or church to sports event, think about the different ways that you change physically, mentally, emotionally with each place. This same holds true as you prepare to write. Mentally you need to recognize a single spot, even if it’s the same place where you eat. You need to train your brain to be in writing mode when you are there with your writing supplies.

The next thing you need to do is warm up your mind. That means you begin to think about what you’re going to write as you get ready to go write. If you’re working on a novel, start playing scenes in your head. If your writing an article, think about the previous articles you’ve written or the interview you just did. Put your brain in the writing frame of mind instead of sitting down at your computer cold.

Whenever possible write the same things at the same time of day. When I began writing I had a newborn, a 2 year old and a 4 year old. I caught writing time between naps and diaper changes. I was able to write my first full novel in two months during that time because I worked the story through when I was feeding one of the babies or watching Barney for the 900th time.

Next time we’re going to deal with minimizing distractions, but for today take some time to determine where it is you’re going to work if you don’t already have that. If you do, look around that workspace and see what kinds of things that are currently distracting you from getting your writing work done. Is it set up in a way that’s conducive to accomplishing your goals? Then mentally prepare. And get writing.

 Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

Over the last few blogs we’ve looked at ways to organize your time so that you can better accomplish your goals. Today we’re going to talk about the importance of not working.

It is important to schedule breaks to give yourself a mental letdown and also to prevent extremes in your work time.

Think about if you don’t let your kids have candy at all. What happens as soon as Halloween or Easter comes around? They are attacking the candy boxes. Or if you never let yourself have sweets. What happens if you go to a party? You overindulge. This same thing is true with breaks. Now I am very guilty of going for five or six straight hours of focus on a single project. The problem is when I run 14 hrs a day, 6 days a week for months at a time I eventually crash. That is not an effective time management tool.

What is better is a system I learned in High School. The work cycle involves focusing on a single task for  45 minutes then taking a 10-15 minute break. And that seems to be pretty consistent for most people, forty-five minutes to sixty minutes at a stretch. If you need more breaks then work on multiple projects during that 45 minutes rather than taking more breaks. If you’re working on books and articles, switching it up between projects so that you can keep your brain alert is fine.

The right kind of break
Now, what should you do during break?
• Stand up, get away from the computer. Keep your blood flowing, keep your body moving; do some stretches; move your arms. Get the blood flowing again so that your brain can become alert.
• Walk down the hall and get a drink of water. This will help your health and your mental alertness.
I drink water during my fifteen minutes, walk down the hall and then pace around my desk when I’m at my office. When I’m working from my home office I actually do away with breaks because my kids help me have breaks. [ha-ha, but working from home is a topic for another day]

To recap these last few blogs, to effectively organize your time you need to:
• you need to create office hours and respect them.
• You need to define what your daily success goals are and recognize how they play a part in your long-term writing.
• And schedule your breaks so that you can stay mentally alert.

Using these tips will help you better organize your time and become a more effective and efficient writer.
 

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.

How do you define success each day? Is it based on some amorphous sense of internal peace or do you have an actual goal you’re striving for when you wake up each day?

When you’re defining success it is imperative that you know what you need to accomplish each day, otherwise it is far too easy to become distracted. Whether you have thirty minutes first thing in the morning or you have to write a thousand words to keep your word count for your contract deadline, a target will keep you focused.

What it is that you’re seeking to accomplish each time you sit down to write or to work on your writing business, is going to be crucial to making sure that you always have forward momentum. There has to be time to not only put words on the page, but also to do the other outside things like marketing, blog tours, submitting to editors and agents, and going to writing conferences. All of these things come in together. Clearly defining what each task is and how it builds into the overall picture of your writing career is going to be crucial.

Just like your characters in your story when you have a plot and a character arc, you have to recognize your overall goals and the pieces that will get you there. What are all of the things that you have to do and how to those break down each day?

Here are some time management resources I recommend:
• Randy Ingermanson’s time management book. It’s an excellent one for writers.
• The recorded webinar I did for the ProVision Network on time management. PVN is a business organization group, so this talk is not specific to writing, but is applicable to writers.
• I’ll also be releasing a new product later this summer and I’ll give more details on that as we get closer. If you’d like to get introductory pricing sign up for my newsletter at this link.

But really what I want to focus on here is knowing what it is that you want to accomplish and not being distracted while you move towards that. Here are some things I’ve done recently to control my time.
• Don’t check email before you’ve done word count. I understand there are some exceptions. My business partner is in Christchurch, New Zealand and I’m in the Eastern time zone. That is a 16 hr time difference. So he’s going to bed at 8 am our time. I look for his first because while I’m sleeping he’s working, and vice versa. I also quickly scan for any emails from my agent or from one of my clients that I’m currently working for to see if there’s something that impacts what my schedule is for the day. Then I turn the email OFF until scheduled email time.
• Write it down. Writing down what it is that you’re trying to accomplish, moving systematically through it, and allowing yourself the fun time will help maximize and organize your writing time and you’ll be able to accomplish more.
• Scheduled breaks. Tomorrow we’ll be talking more about the importance of breaks in your overall time management scheme.
• Mental preparation. It is important to mentally prepare for your writing time as well as get your materials prepared. This helps minimize writers block. We will talk more about this on Monday.

The bottom line to organization and time management is to incrementally change bad behaviors to efficient behaviors. Today try turning off your email for an hour and focus on a single project. See how much more you’re able to accomplish.

See you tomorrow.

Don’t miss a single posting! Subscribe here to receive these postings by e-mail. Tiffany Colter is a writer, speaker and writing career coach who works with beginner to published writers. She can be reached through her website at writingcareercoach.com.